Hopper’s Hotels
Major works by Edward Hopper are featured in a hotel-themed exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Traveling in the early 20th century came with many options that might seem very confusing today in our era of Airbnb and full-featured resorts.there were hotels, which had lobbies and more amenities. Motels were lobby-less and were designed so guests could park in front of their rooms.then there were motor courts and motor lodges, with imperceptible differences to motels.apartment hotels were for longer stays, but with a common dining area. Tourist homes were essentially early bedand-breakfasts.and that’s just scratching the surface.
These many forms of travel accommodations are the stars of a new Edward Hopper exhibition, Edward Hopper and the American Hotel, opening October 26 at thevirginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond,virginia.
“It’s going to be an interesting exhibition because visitors might learn about hotels as much as they learn about Hopper,” says Dr. Leo G. Mazow, the Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art at VMFA. “Hotels are just very apt vehicles because they help us understand a journey, and the road we take while on the journey—on the road the hotels are sometimes the milestones.”
Hopper, who did commercial illustration early in his career for two hotel trade magazines, Hotel
Management and Tavern Topics, spent a great deal of time on the road and frequented many varieties of hotels and motels. His travels accelerated when, in 1924, he married Josephine “Jo” Nivison, an artist herself, and the two would frequently hit the road in search of subject matter. Many of their adventures on the road were documented in diaries meticulously kept by Josephine, who Mazow says was a “quite gregarious individual.”
“They went about as far east as you can go without falling into the Atlantic, to South Truro, [Massachusetts], where they had a summer home.they drove a lot through New England, but later they took a road trip to Mexico,” Mazow says.“when you read Josephine’s diaries you read page after page of formal analysis of the hotel
rooms, motor courts and tourist hotels they stayed in early on.you really get a sense for what these places looked like from his diaries.” The exhibition will feature 65 works by Hopper, as well as 35 works from other greats who explored similar themes, including John Singer Sargent, David Hockney, Berenice Abbott, Charles Demuth, Edward Ruscha and many others.additionally, the exhibition will feature Josephine’s diaries and photography of Hopper, who has strong links to thevirginia museum—he served as chairman of thevmfa’s first biennial exhibition
in 1938, and returned again in 1953.The exhibition will also feature the Hopper Hotel Experience that will allow guests to stay overnight at the museum in a hotel room modeled after Hopper’s
1957 Western Hotel. It is already sold out—“no vacancies,” in hotel talk.
The real draw for visitors, though, will be the paintings, of which many are Hopper classics or outright masterpieces. Western Hotel is certainly one of the latter, on par with Nighthawks for many Hopper fans, Mazow says.the work, on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery, shows a woman seated on a bed in a spacious room with green walls and large windows that look out over rolling hills. Another important work is Hotel Lobby, painted in 1943 and on loan from the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which shows three figures casually arranged in the lobby of a hotel. Mazow says his eye is immediately drawn to the green stripe that runs along the tile floor. “These stripes on the floor were ways of controlling where people walked in a hotel, and here if you looked at where it leads it goes right back to the restaurant. It also offered a sort of ambulatory etiquette for guests, as well as dictate where the furniture was to be put,” the curator says, adding that several drawing studies for the work will be shown next to the finished piece.“hopper was very interested in this green line and even refers to it in his notes for the work.” Other pieces include the 1932 painting Room in New York, which offers an almost voyeuristic glimpse into a domestic setting taking place in front of an open window; Morning in a City, featuring a nude figure standing at an open window; and his famous 1931 work Hotel Room, showing a woman wearing only a slip seated on a bed reading a train schedule. Hotel Room is painted from the perspective of a guest that is passing by an open door and gazing in on a moment that is equally intimate and banal.
The exhibition gives new meaning to the phrase “hotel art,” which was not lost on Mazow and his team at the Vmfa.“hotels and paintings have a lot in common.they are both painted, and both considered property, but also getaways. For both of them, we’re in their presence for a period of time, but then we move on,” he says.“and they both also rely on illusion and the sense of disbelief. Hotels bank on the illusion of home, even though they’re not home. Paintings share some of that quality.”